Having Sales Reps prospect me is one of the most eye opening parts of my job.

Being a quant type of guy (nerd might fit too), I decided to track & categorize the sales processes that Reps have put me through over the last few weeks.

Here’s what I saw:

By my math, that's a less than 9% of Reps doing something more than drive-by prospecting. This left me wondering, what is it that drives 1 Rep to commit to a process – where 9 others fall short?

Over at For Entrepreneurs, David Skok (VC at Matrix Partners) shared a slide deck he presented at the Boston Lean Startup Circle on Building a Sales & Marketing machine.

The presentation covered:

What was most interesting for me was thinking about David’s presentation in light of a recent free trial of some SaaS software I just completed. Actually, I didn’t just complete it – I endured it.

But first to David’s points. Note: the deck is 124 slides deep – so I thought I might pick out a few and share my thoughts.
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Steve led off with this question:

How many dials does it take your Reps to get 1 connect?

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He then shared the following metric from the folks at ConnectAndSell: 22

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Steve laid out a series of factors that are contributing to 21 of 22 dials resulting in non-connects. Here are 3 points that really stood out for me:

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Earlier this week I was lucky enough to listen in on a Focus.com roundtable billed Bigger, Better, Faster: Inside Sales in 2011. Moderated by Chris Snell who lead the panel through a range of topics around Inside Sales & Inside Sales Management. (The recording [MP3 file] has been made available, so you can give it a listen when you have some time.)

I thought it would be interesting to highlight three questions that the panel addressed: